Before I reach for another tissue, let me explain why my fingers are splashed and splotted and dotted with black spots. I'm sick with the flu. And I've spent the last three days, since my fever broke, grumbling under the lingering ache and fatigue of the virus. Every morning, I've struggled awake, one leg still stuck in the hammock of dreams, and rolled out of the covers, trying to breathe through a clotted nose. Throat scratchy and on fire. Mind a foggy dome of NyQuil stupor. I look in the mirror at a frizzy, brown head. Never get a haircut under the influence of antihistamines, I think and flip the new bangs with my fingers.
I swallow my pill and shove down breakfast: a big bowl of too much shredded wheat and a sliced banana, and one mug of black tea. For a few moments, I gaze at our newly dug vegetable garden, huddled in the grassy ground above the septic tank. The romaine lettuce isn't wilting anymore. Normally, on a day when walking from couch to kitchen doesn't leave me breathless, I'd clean or worry or go for a walk or try to read but worry instead. Today, however, I don't care how many cookies I eat or how long my ass stays plastered to the couch. I'm sick, and I'm sitting all day. No question about it.
After the first two days of fever have passed, however, that energetic itch is scratching at my body to GO GO GO!!! I try to clean but collapse. I try to worry but don't care. I try to go for a walk... no, I don't. I don't try to go for a walk. The sun is out and I can already feel my organs boiling over with fever again. Regardless, my mind needs something to wrap itself in for a few hours. Something slow. Something easy. Oddly enough, I don't feel like writing. It's painting I want. I want brushes. I want watercolors. The last time I poured over a piece of artwork for five hours was four winters ago, when it was too cold and too deep to venture outside. Now, on a warm day with trees frisky in the wind, one which I'd usually partake in, I'm at the table surrounded by paint brushes, cups of water, white trays stained rainbow, sheets of spread newspaper, pencils, and two old erasers.
First, I sketch and erase. Sketch and erase. Sketch and erase until a dim, graphite figure is stretched out over the rough paper and I'm ready to stain her body blue, and the liquid sheet wrapping around her hips, orange. There are seven different brushes, all with translucent red handles that remind me of candy, spread out over the newspaper, each tipped with different size bristles. Some are fat and long. Others are the size of a single flax seed. Two are shaped like raindrops.
The first layer is the easiest, and I'm sitting normal at the table, with an almost-straight back, clutching a long-handled, fat-headed brush. My arm moves quickly. Thoughts skip around in my head like a flat stone over water. I get up to pee or latch Elmer to his lead or drink orange juice. On the second layer, however, my eyes must become more intimate with the page. I'm stooped low over the table with a finer brush. My fingers rest on the thin handle with precision. Arm moves slow over the dampening figure. The paper goes limp with dampness. It curls as water evaporates. I grumble when my bladder tells me to go the bathroom. The third layer is for shadowing and depth and dimension. My eyes go blurry, but I blink, rub my aching neck, and continue adding roundness to the left arm.
Time drops by. Eventually, adding layers and shape and perspective to the figure doesn't matter. The piece becomes less of a painting and more of a being. A living song. Warm flesh with a past and future. Something that breathes and moves when I lean close to smear shadows between her fingers. I'm lost in this growing figure, speaking to her, touching each curve of her body with streaks of color as thin as feather quills. I discover magic when I line the purple body with black acrylic paint, and I realize it's been too long since I last felt this power.
In the rush of life, a place where my real body must be carefully fed, exercised, cleansed, and perfected, where deadlines force my writing to grow faster than it wants to, and where schedules and routine build walls and canyons between me and my desires, this week with the flu has kept me moving slow. It's kept me home with nothing to do but shake free the knots of my cobwebbed mind and explore it. Simplicity isn't what I normally strive for. It's what I'm afraid of. My whole life, I've been taught that nothing is simple. Everything is a challenge. I must work hard to fulfill my desire to be a writer and an artist, toiling over pen and paper until an entire day is exhausted under the weight of my strain.
But during these last three days, couch-ridden and stuck at the dining room table with a pad of 90 lb Canson watercolor paper, I've learned that none of this is true. Today, I painted a woman, a simple, purple woman cupping a yellow sun in her hands. Yes, I focused and measured, erased and painted over, cursed and sneered, but in the end, when she was finished, I realized I'd moved slow. I simmered. I relished the smell of water, the feel of acrylic spots drying to my skin, the page corners curling against my palms. Each second lingered. Ginger snaps never tasted better. Work didn't call me in. My father came home and convinced me to stroll through the woods, un-rushed. Life felt long and full and slow. Like it would last forever. As if I had forever. I loved the way I created, and I loved the way my body fit perfectly into the figure I painted, the one with black splotches on her hands.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Pulling Off Wings
Dreaming is what she did best, when she was young and unburdened and capable of clinging to the present like the life short-lived by a butterfly, but she's old now, thin-limbed but heavy with eyes that are always bruised. She scrapes fat tent caterpillars from tree limbs and crushes their silky white homes. She wants to burn them, protect the flowers that blossom pink and fragrant over the limbs of weeping cherry trees, and the cruelty has tugged her inward. Her senses can't collect the textures, smells, sights, tastes, sounds of the world to pack into dreams.
She's left with nightmare.
She remembers dreaming of her mother, another version of her mother, one tall and blond with smooth arms and legs. They sat cross-legged on her mother's apartment carpet, necks craned upwards towards an illuminated screen that fell down over the far wall like a sheet. The film projector hummed and clicked from somewhere in the room. Astrological signs, images of a Leo lion and Aquarius, the goat with curled horns and a wide fin, filled circles. Strange symbols crested the waves of empty space looping around the curved, black lines.
It happens in a moment of heightened emotion, she remembers her mother explaining earlier, and now her mother says, "This is what I was watching when it happened to me."
The girl wants it, too. She watches the screen with hunger but feels nothing shift inside her body.
She should be watching the three toddlers sitting in the corner of the room rolling colorful plastic blocks across the floor. They're dressed in blue, and their eyes are the eyes of older people. They flick them towards the girl, yellow and irised marbles in their balled skulls, and continue plucking at the blocks with stunted fingers. The couch is sitting uncomfortably to the children's' left. The girl should've placed the toddlers on the couch, high above the floor.
But she forgets about them, absorbed in her envy, and she and her mother stride down the hallway to the apartment's only bedroom. A large window is filled with blackness and the moon. Everything becomes silver in the bright shadows, and they fall asleep.
When the girl wakes, she smells water. The moon is burning like a cool light bulb, and darkness is muffled daylight, a silver and translucent ghost. She stirs up in bed, the sheets cold around her limbs. Moon-drenched water curls through the apartment, rising almost as high as the top of the mattress. The covers are like sand and she's trembling on a soft island when she realizes the children are still huddled in the living room corner, now drowning. Her mother is awake, with azure eyes and her left leg tilted into the water, slick and grey. Mother's right leg unfolds and slips into the domestic sea, melts into the other like candle wax. A fin blooms where her toes should be, and she slides off the sheets, her face the last part of her body to submerge. The girl leans over the bed and watches her mother's nose grow long and grey-blue, her eyes spread apart, her neck tilt back. Mother is a dolphin, and she swims away towards the ancient-eyed children.
The girl wants to be like her, but she's not. She must trudge on legs through the black hallway. When she dips her arms deep into the icy bottom and lifts the children free, they are wrinkled and snarling. Grey. With hollow sockets where the eyes once were. They are bloated, dead, animal-like bodies. She can do nothing but drop them into the water, wade back to bed, and sleep.
She wakes. Daylight shows a clean, dry floor. Three scuttling shadows dash past the wide crack of the closed door. Shadows of small, naked feet spread over the carpet, and beams of red light move ahead of them. Their eyes are the glowing eyes of red vermin. She let the children drown, and in their suffering they transformed into river rats. Wise-eyed, snarling rats of the water. The girl wants what they have.
Her organs grow hot and cruel with envy.
She follows her mother into a building, hoping to undo what's happened. They move through a white hallway smelling of alcohol, her mother striding ahead with blond hair and the girl craning her neck to the right as she notices a roomful of scientists in baking soda-white lab coats. Vials and tubes and tunnels of enigmatic, sparkling, burbling liquid steam and drop one particle at a time into clean beakers. The scientists scuttle back and forth across the room, quick and with pursed mouths and furrowed brows, scribbling in notebooks, dribbling beads of sweat. Small mammals are in cages, she thinks of the children, but the doors of the elevator open to her left and let a stream of white-clothed humans tumble out into the hallway. The girl's transfixed by the elevator. The elevator with a heavy wooden door looming black against the back wall. The door that suddenly opens like the throbbing, hot walls of her hormone-infested heart.
Her skin grows prickly at the sight of a tall, ragged-faced man blowing from the hidden room like a storm wind, his black coat billowing, his skin a wrinkled, cloudy mass beneath disheveled hair. From his shoulder sprouts the mutated, dead face of a lion, its paws jutting out into the cold air with sharp claws. They are reaching for the girl, and this man is a failed experiment. Her experiment. She's hot and burbling inside like lava. People in white coats flutter toward her like frightened sheep, but she won't peel her sight from the grey-skinned man. He turns towards her. His eyes are old. He is a storm cloud billowing and swelling with skin cold as ice. And the world is silent and suddenly black.
Diagonal slashes of red. Three times across the black screen of her vision. She doesn't know what's happening, but, finally, she wakes.
Glass shattered. Paper loosed and violent. Shimmering liquid dripping from remaining shards of smooth tubes. A ticking sound. Dead scientists drooped over sterilized counters. Red staining white, and the hollow tunnel of one man's throat exposed. The girl's mouth and hands coated in the acrid, sticky presence of blood.
One scientist with his ribs gashed open is still alive. He looks at the girl and holds out his bloody hands. "You didn't do this. You didn't do this. We just have to convince them that you didn't do this."
But she knows the truth.
She is the lion.
She is envy.
She is the one, the killer, who pulled wings from the moth before they grew.
She's left with nightmare.
She remembers dreaming of her mother, another version of her mother, one tall and blond with smooth arms and legs. They sat cross-legged on her mother's apartment carpet, necks craned upwards towards an illuminated screen that fell down over the far wall like a sheet. The film projector hummed and clicked from somewhere in the room. Astrological signs, images of a Leo lion and Aquarius, the goat with curled horns and a wide fin, filled circles. Strange symbols crested the waves of empty space looping around the curved, black lines.
It happens in a moment of heightened emotion, she remembers her mother explaining earlier, and now her mother says, "This is what I was watching when it happened to me."
The girl wants it, too. She watches the screen with hunger but feels nothing shift inside her body.
She should be watching the three toddlers sitting in the corner of the room rolling colorful plastic blocks across the floor. They're dressed in blue, and their eyes are the eyes of older people. They flick them towards the girl, yellow and irised marbles in their balled skulls, and continue plucking at the blocks with stunted fingers. The couch is sitting uncomfortably to the children's' left. The girl should've placed the toddlers on the couch, high above the floor.
But she forgets about them, absorbed in her envy, and she and her mother stride down the hallway to the apartment's only bedroom. A large window is filled with blackness and the moon. Everything becomes silver in the bright shadows, and they fall asleep.
When the girl wakes, she smells water. The moon is burning like a cool light bulb, and darkness is muffled daylight, a silver and translucent ghost. She stirs up in bed, the sheets cold around her limbs. Moon-drenched water curls through the apartment, rising almost as high as the top of the mattress. The covers are like sand and she's trembling on a soft island when she realizes the children are still huddled in the living room corner, now drowning. Her mother is awake, with azure eyes and her left leg tilted into the water, slick and grey. Mother's right leg unfolds and slips into the domestic sea, melts into the other like candle wax. A fin blooms where her toes should be, and she slides off the sheets, her face the last part of her body to submerge. The girl leans over the bed and watches her mother's nose grow long and grey-blue, her eyes spread apart, her neck tilt back. Mother is a dolphin, and she swims away towards the ancient-eyed children.
The girl wants to be like her, but she's not. She must trudge on legs through the black hallway. When she dips her arms deep into the icy bottom and lifts the children free, they are wrinkled and snarling. Grey. With hollow sockets where the eyes once were. They are bloated, dead, animal-like bodies. She can do nothing but drop them into the water, wade back to bed, and sleep.
She wakes. Daylight shows a clean, dry floor. Three scuttling shadows dash past the wide crack of the closed door. Shadows of small, naked feet spread over the carpet, and beams of red light move ahead of them. Their eyes are the glowing eyes of red vermin. She let the children drown, and in their suffering they transformed into river rats. Wise-eyed, snarling rats of the water. The girl wants what they have.
Her organs grow hot and cruel with envy.
She follows her mother into a building, hoping to undo what's happened. They move through a white hallway smelling of alcohol, her mother striding ahead with blond hair and the girl craning her neck to the right as she notices a roomful of scientists in baking soda-white lab coats. Vials and tubes and tunnels of enigmatic, sparkling, burbling liquid steam and drop one particle at a time into clean beakers. The scientists scuttle back and forth across the room, quick and with pursed mouths and furrowed brows, scribbling in notebooks, dribbling beads of sweat. Small mammals are in cages, she thinks of the children, but the doors of the elevator open to her left and let a stream of white-clothed humans tumble out into the hallway. The girl's transfixed by the elevator. The elevator with a heavy wooden door looming black against the back wall. The door that suddenly opens like the throbbing, hot walls of her hormone-infested heart.
Her skin grows prickly at the sight of a tall, ragged-faced man blowing from the hidden room like a storm wind, his black coat billowing, his skin a wrinkled, cloudy mass beneath disheveled hair. From his shoulder sprouts the mutated, dead face of a lion, its paws jutting out into the cold air with sharp claws. They are reaching for the girl, and this man is a failed experiment. Her experiment. She's hot and burbling inside like lava. People in white coats flutter toward her like frightened sheep, but she won't peel her sight from the grey-skinned man. He turns towards her. His eyes are old. He is a storm cloud billowing and swelling with skin cold as ice. And the world is silent and suddenly black.
Diagonal slashes of red. Three times across the black screen of her vision. She doesn't know what's happening, but, finally, she wakes.
Glass shattered. Paper loosed and violent. Shimmering liquid dripping from remaining shards of smooth tubes. A ticking sound. Dead scientists drooped over sterilized counters. Red staining white, and the hollow tunnel of one man's throat exposed. The girl's mouth and hands coated in the acrid, sticky presence of blood.
One scientist with his ribs gashed open is still alive. He looks at the girl and holds out his bloody hands. "You didn't do this. You didn't do this. We just have to convince them that you didn't do this."
But she knows the truth.
She is the lion.
She is envy.
She is the one, the killer, who pulled wings from the moth before they grew.
Friday, March 27, 2009
The Season of Beans
Line breaks, spacing and indentations are skewed.
The Season of Beans
I
The farmer drinks real milk,
thick and fresh from the cow’s udders
with that pudding skin on top
and flies wobbling around, tainted by the acrid,
addictive aroma of manure and sweat.
He only knows
the roundness of spotted melons in moonlight,
dark-stained mornings awoken
by the trumpet of a rooster, summers of cold creeks,
earth tilling, wild animal smells, hay bailing, jarred peaches,
the wisp of warm wind carrying dust,
a sun-browned woman’s yellow hair and thin dress.
II
I once knew this lady, this beautiful, lost lady wearing petals
for a dress & a smell like nothing I ever smelled before.
III
Rain
and then more rain. The woman leaning with the wild
flowers and wet wind over the farmer
and the blanket swelling into a lake, caught in a sun-drenched
morning by love, unable to be carried away.
Her father in the distance with amber
whiskey and slick rifle, lightning spear from clouds
and wind heavy enough to hide his rough voice, her name,
the crack of a gun, his body falling face-down
limp into a stream, a woman’s breath caught by her hands
when they find him.
IV
Here I am, once again
all alone on this hot & beautiful
summer Monday. I’m cooking in the sun
but a cloud just covered it & it feels
good. I wish the entire blue sky were filled
with sun-covering clouds right now. I talked
to Dawn this morning. I miss her. I miss walking
together, heads together, our voices together & then her voice
singing alone. I want her
to come down & visit me in August.
It’s so damn hot out here.
Even the ink is dripping.
V
Chicken eggs piled high in a brown
woven basket, collected by his girl covered
with wood dust and feathers. He hates them but eats them
for the morning with her and the molasses-thick coffee she pours.
Unplowed fields and the horses, sweaty in their stables,
will not wait for the farmer. He kisses his girl, touches the valleys
of her ear with the tips of his soil-stained fingers, and leaves.
She watches him whistle towards the barn, sun blanketing his back,
and fills the sink.
Her porcelain face and pretty yellow hair slips in completely.
VI
I was thinking how I wished that I’d saved this journal for another
time. This isn’t the summer I hoped for or the one
I thought it would be.
VII
She was only always a mirage,
an illusion built of beer and the ache
of loneliness that comes when night leaves
him nothing to do but watch fire crackle in hearths
of brown stone, the mud and ash of wood beneath
his heels, an imagined memory as pungent
as the burning smell of cherry and birch smoldering it smelled
like her hair,
he tells himself, she is not real,
over and over until he tastes the salt and wet soil in his palms.
VIII
I’ll say it again. A nice big cloud over the sun
& everything not going in the direction I desired. It smells
like rain.
IX
A ghost
floats beside him as alcohol slides into his throat
and he sits on a wide machine, moving slowly, chopping
heads off wheat stalks, the kernels like nuggets of fools
gold. Let water wash over it, watch colors
disappear and all the smells
slip away with it.
It would come back after a rain. She smelled like sunflowers
in her dress, her thin dress. I’ll follow her
thin dress. It was
real.
X
Soil in his hair, soil in nails, soil
in the splayed creases coming from the corners
of his eyes where he begins to grow old
without her,
the crevices where he collects liquid like rows
in a cabbage field or the dip between two graves.
He wants to wash himself clean
in the pond beyond the tall, flaking barn where he tosses
hay into cool evenings.
He’ll dive headfirst into a stone,
crashing through moonlight – her face
when he found her lying still – and rise lifeless.
But he hears her, sees her
eyes glowing in the daisies at night,
the grass like her dress around his knees, the dress
she wore when she first found him bent
over a milk bucket alone and knowing nothing
but the season of beans. It is August.
The Season of Beans
I
The farmer drinks real milk,
thick and fresh from the cow’s udders
with that pudding skin on top
and flies wobbling around, tainted by the acrid,
addictive aroma of manure and sweat.
He only knows
the roundness of spotted melons in moonlight,
dark-stained mornings awoken
by the trumpet of a rooster, summers of cold creeks,
earth tilling, wild animal smells, hay bailing, jarred peaches,
the wisp of warm wind carrying dust,
a sun-browned woman’s yellow hair and thin dress.
II
I once knew this lady, this beautiful, lost lady wearing petals
for a dress & a smell like nothing I ever smelled before.
III
Rain
and then more rain. The woman leaning with the wild
flowers and wet wind over the farmer
and the blanket swelling into a lake, caught in a sun-drenched
morning by love, unable to be carried away.
Her father in the distance with amber
whiskey and slick rifle, lightning spear from clouds
and wind heavy enough to hide his rough voice, her name,
the crack of a gun, his body falling face-down
limp into a stream, a woman’s breath caught by her hands
when they find him.
IV
Here I am, once again
all alone on this hot & beautiful
summer Monday. I’m cooking in the sun
but a cloud just covered it & it feels
good. I wish the entire blue sky were filled
with sun-covering clouds right now. I talked
to Dawn this morning. I miss her. I miss walking
together, heads together, our voices together & then her voice
singing alone. I want her
to come down & visit me in August.
It’s so damn hot out here.
Even the ink is dripping.
V
Chicken eggs piled high in a brown
woven basket, collected by his girl covered
with wood dust and feathers. He hates them but eats them
for the morning with her and the molasses-thick coffee she pours.
Unplowed fields and the horses, sweaty in their stables,
will not wait for the farmer. He kisses his girl, touches the valleys
of her ear with the tips of his soil-stained fingers, and leaves.
She watches him whistle towards the barn, sun blanketing his back,
and fills the sink.
Her porcelain face and pretty yellow hair slips in completely.
VI
I was thinking how I wished that I’d saved this journal for another
time. This isn’t the summer I hoped for or the one
I thought it would be.
VII
She was only always a mirage,
an illusion built of beer and the ache
of loneliness that comes when night leaves
him nothing to do but watch fire crackle in hearths
of brown stone, the mud and ash of wood beneath
his heels, an imagined memory as pungent
as the burning smell of cherry and birch smoldering it smelled
like her hair,
he tells himself, she is not real,
over and over until he tastes the salt and wet soil in his palms.
VIII
I’ll say it again. A nice big cloud over the sun
& everything not going in the direction I desired. It smells
like rain.
IX
A ghost
floats beside him as alcohol slides into his throat
and he sits on a wide machine, moving slowly, chopping
heads off wheat stalks, the kernels like nuggets of fools
gold. Let water wash over it, watch colors
disappear and all the smells
slip away with it.
It would come back after a rain. She smelled like sunflowers
in her dress, her thin dress. I’ll follow her
thin dress. It was
real.
X
Soil in his hair, soil in nails, soil
in the splayed creases coming from the corners
of his eyes where he begins to grow old
without her,
the crevices where he collects liquid like rows
in a cabbage field or the dip between two graves.
He wants to wash himself clean
in the pond beyond the tall, flaking barn where he tosses
hay into cool evenings.
He’ll dive headfirst into a stone,
crashing through moonlight – her face
when he found her lying still – and rise lifeless.
But he hears her, sees her
eyes glowing in the daisies at night,
the grass like her dress around his knees, the dress
she wore when she first found him bent
over a milk bucket alone and knowing nothing
but the season of beans. It is August.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Restless Eye Movement
You won't notice the sudden flux of pain
when a burning, flame enshrouded foot is severed from the ankle
with one clean swing of a sharpened, singing blade.
Only the tone of your voice will change as you jolt backwards, gravel
digging into loose palm, sky rocketing away in red and head smacking
into a smooth stone, lights snapping out.
Waking will return your lost appendage, numb, naked and bound
under cotton sheets beneath the other, sadistic ankle.
It was just a dream but you can still feel it burning as you stumble
down a flight of stairs, crooked fingers clawing air, for a cold swallow of water.
when a burning, flame enshrouded foot is severed from the ankle
with one clean swing of a sharpened, singing blade.
Only the tone of your voice will change as you jolt backwards, gravel
digging into loose palm, sky rocketing away in red and head smacking
into a smooth stone, lights snapping out.
Waking will return your lost appendage, numb, naked and bound
under cotton sheets beneath the other, sadistic ankle.
It was just a dream but you can still feel it burning as you stumble
down a flight of stairs, crooked fingers clawing air, for a cold swallow of water.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Weddings and Then Happy Endings
Dean slides sideways and slaps his hands together, yellow button-up shirt matching my silk dress, smile and shoulders rising with Electric. He moves back, fists punching the air in slow motion, feet weaving in and out. Coming forward, he does a little spin. He's my one-time date at my cousin's wedding. I'm the skinny maid of honor with a crazy up-do and thick-rimmed, brown glasses. He moved the car so I wouldn't have to step in the mud, and then opened my door, explaining that he's still an old fashioned guy. I told him to stay that way. There's not many left.
The bride sits beside me watching with her cake, lace dress and regret. Her mother smoked a joint before the ceremony. We're not dancing to the electric slide again. Soar feet strapped with heels are difficult to maneuver. I'm champagne buzzed with an aching neck. The muscles tensed when I tried to prevent myself from blacking out while standing close to the altar, watching a tall man put a gold thing on my cousin's finger. After the ceremony a photographer snapped pictures and the rest of us headed to the fire house for the reception of salad and ziti and tradition. I was forced to walk in dramatically, arm linked with the burly best man's, all eyes watching and sappy music playing over the speakers. Later I collected money from strangers who danced with the bride. I was supposed to shuffle each person along, keep the long line moving, but I have a problem talking to strangers and an even bigger problem telling them what to do. Someone took over for me. The hell ended and dancing began. My cousin's new husband smashed cake on her face and she smashed some back. A sugar-coated foreshadowing of what was to come later.
Best time we ever had, Dean says two months later, face illuminated by fire light and the flicker of mosquitoes.
I'm draped in a lawn chair by my family's fire pit in the back yard, bare feet dangling over one side, loose hair flung over the other. We're cooking cheese weenies and I hadn't seen Dean since the wedding. Now we're rekindling memories while my parents sip beer. I smile, remembering the red helium balloon bouncing against my knee after the reception, the dancing, the bride's long face and her lace gown soiled at the edges. Two years later divorce will slip from her lips over burrito dinners, and I'm glad I have no need to utter that word.
Dean and I were dressed in yellow with no commitment or shiny bands tinting our fingers, no delicate designs sweeping over rented room floors, only singleness and blueberry soda by a fire pit later. My cousin picks her husband's empty beer cans and sweaty socks from the floor. In summers Dean and I embark on walks down long country roads, sunlight splashing our backs and the wide, yellow fields specked with cows, free hands swinging un-synchronized.
The bride sits beside me watching with her cake, lace dress and regret. Her mother smoked a joint before the ceremony. We're not dancing to the electric slide again. Soar feet strapped with heels are difficult to maneuver. I'm champagne buzzed with an aching neck. The muscles tensed when I tried to prevent myself from blacking out while standing close to the altar, watching a tall man put a gold thing on my cousin's finger. After the ceremony a photographer snapped pictures and the rest of us headed to the fire house for the reception of salad and ziti and tradition. I was forced to walk in dramatically, arm linked with the burly best man's, all eyes watching and sappy music playing over the speakers. Later I collected money from strangers who danced with the bride. I was supposed to shuffle each person along, keep the long line moving, but I have a problem talking to strangers and an even bigger problem telling them what to do. Someone took over for me. The hell ended and dancing began. My cousin's new husband smashed cake on her face and she smashed some back. A sugar-coated foreshadowing of what was to come later.
Best time we ever had, Dean says two months later, face illuminated by fire light and the flicker of mosquitoes.
I'm draped in a lawn chair by my family's fire pit in the back yard, bare feet dangling over one side, loose hair flung over the other. We're cooking cheese weenies and I hadn't seen Dean since the wedding. Now we're rekindling memories while my parents sip beer. I smile, remembering the red helium balloon bouncing against my knee after the reception, the dancing, the bride's long face and her lace gown soiled at the edges. Two years later divorce will slip from her lips over burrito dinners, and I'm glad I have no need to utter that word.
Dean and I were dressed in yellow with no commitment or shiny bands tinting our fingers, no delicate designs sweeping over rented room floors, only singleness and blueberry soda by a fire pit later. My cousin picks her husband's empty beer cans and sweaty socks from the floor. In summers Dean and I embark on walks down long country roads, sunlight splashing our backs and the wide, yellow fields specked with cows, free hands swinging un-synchronized.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Contains Antioxidants
I remember when I pour the hot water over my hand around nine o’clock. Flesh puckers into chicken skin, and I have to sit in the sticky chair of an emergency clinic’s waiting room for the rest of the night. A nurse argues with an Amish family, breathlessly trying to convince them that the doctor’s machines and bagged liquid will save their daughter’s life. This is going to be a while, the receptionist tells me, peeking from behind her bifocals.
Now, nearly ten years later, I sit at the dining room table, pink sunlight spilling on the stained wood, waiting for the stainless-steel kettle’s whistle. Already steam is puffing from the spout’s small hole as the liquid grows hot, but I never pour water into a mug until it comes to a complete and messy boil.
My cat plods down the stairs, stretches, and winds her tortoise shell body against my leg. I reach down to touch her, and she nips at my hand. I call her a bitch and continue flipping through a collection of Scott Cairn’s poetry. I read about a dune and a moon’s blue light bleeding over red sand. No one the poet encounters believes that the hoofed mammals live in the desert, but Scott watches his moose howl to the moon with round, furry mouths. The cat swats at my leg, nose scrunched and ears pressed against her head. I kick her away, and the kettle whistles.
I push back my chair. Its legs sigh against the black and white checkered floor. Kit Kat, back arched and tiptoeing sideways across the linoleum, continues swatting at my ankles as I cross the kitchen. I can’t help but laugh at her ridiculous pose, puffed up to the girth of a rhinoceros in her mind, but about the size of a squishy bug in mine. I jump and land hard in front of her, dishes and cookie jars rattling on top of the refrigerator. She leaps, fur standing on end, and slides away into the basement.
Clouds cover the sinking sun as I pass the sink window. Looking past a wooden angel kneeling next to an olive dish and the brown leaves of a hydroponic plant, I watch snow clouds roll in thick from Lake Ontario. The snow-laden trees turn inky black as shadows creep over an already aging day, their prickly branches like twisted arthritic hands in the cold. I click a knob on the stove from HIGH to OFF and pour hot water over the tea bag. Even though I’m afraid of the burbling, fizzling, spitting water that sputters from the spout as I tip it over the cup, I keep my left arm tucked safely by my side. Clear liquid grows dark as the bag swells and drowns. Cupping my hands around the warm, yellow mug, I carry it to the table and resume my pondering.
Tea is supposed to cure cancer. I mean, it’s supposed to prevent cancer, but sometimes I wish it cured. The bitter drink is the blood of western tea leaves, thick with antioxidants and blessings from the monks. I drink it every day, sometimes three times a day, but never not at all. I wonder what would’ve happened if my stepmother drank it all her life instead of spending most of it parched and parked in front of the television with beer and pretzels. Last year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She’s fine now, recovering well as far as we know, but sometimes I still wish I could pour warm tea all over her body. I wish tea would flood the world and cover everything that I love, everything I don’t.
I tip my head close to the mug. Steam fogs the lenses of my glasses, and I inhale, chest rising until it won’t rise any more. The warm dampness fills my lungs. Already I can taste the bitterness of soaked leaves. When it cools and is safe to swallow, the liquid slides into my throat, past a malfunctioning thyroid gland, and down into my belly where it settles like hands over an aching wound. Kit Kat saunters into the room like nothing happened.
Stapled to the end of a white string trailing from the folded bag of coagulated leaves, a paper tag is printed with the evening’s inspirational quote. Unlike Salada tea, which makes a poor attempt at humor, Yogi’s messages are profound, and I stash them in a little white drawer beneath a mirror. I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful stacked on top of Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy. I save one Salada tag. It says that Real intelligence is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. I slurp down the last bit of tea and stare out the sliding glass door.
Dad’s going in for a colonoscopy. Doctors poke at my mother’s lumpy uterus and suck her blood into plastic cylinders. My stepmother’s still waiting to find out if the radiation treatment was successful or if there’s nothing else they can do. Snow floats down, thick flakes covering the brown lumps and footprints scattered throughout the yard, and a silver spoon clinks against glass. The tea’s inside me, swimming in my veins. Kit Kat curls around my legs, lets me touch her. Scott Cairn’s book lay silent on the table. And as I reach for the teabag’s paper tab, I notice that the snow is glowing blue, blazing like a light into darkness.
Now, nearly ten years later, I sit at the dining room table, pink sunlight spilling on the stained wood, waiting for the stainless-steel kettle’s whistle. Already steam is puffing from the spout’s small hole as the liquid grows hot, but I never pour water into a mug until it comes to a complete and messy boil.
My cat plods down the stairs, stretches, and winds her tortoise shell body against my leg. I reach down to touch her, and she nips at my hand. I call her a bitch and continue flipping through a collection of Scott Cairn’s poetry. I read about a dune and a moon’s blue light bleeding over red sand. No one the poet encounters believes that the hoofed mammals live in the desert, but Scott watches his moose howl to the moon with round, furry mouths. The cat swats at my leg, nose scrunched and ears pressed against her head. I kick her away, and the kettle whistles.
I push back my chair. Its legs sigh against the black and white checkered floor. Kit Kat, back arched and tiptoeing sideways across the linoleum, continues swatting at my ankles as I cross the kitchen. I can’t help but laugh at her ridiculous pose, puffed up to the girth of a rhinoceros in her mind, but about the size of a squishy bug in mine. I jump and land hard in front of her, dishes and cookie jars rattling on top of the refrigerator. She leaps, fur standing on end, and slides away into the basement.
Clouds cover the sinking sun as I pass the sink window. Looking past a wooden angel kneeling next to an olive dish and the brown leaves of a hydroponic plant, I watch snow clouds roll in thick from Lake Ontario. The snow-laden trees turn inky black as shadows creep over an already aging day, their prickly branches like twisted arthritic hands in the cold. I click a knob on the stove from HIGH to OFF and pour hot water over the tea bag. Even though I’m afraid of the burbling, fizzling, spitting water that sputters from the spout as I tip it over the cup, I keep my left arm tucked safely by my side. Clear liquid grows dark as the bag swells and drowns. Cupping my hands around the warm, yellow mug, I carry it to the table and resume my pondering.
Tea is supposed to cure cancer. I mean, it’s supposed to prevent cancer, but sometimes I wish it cured. The bitter drink is the blood of western tea leaves, thick with antioxidants and blessings from the monks. I drink it every day, sometimes three times a day, but never not at all. I wonder what would’ve happened if my stepmother drank it all her life instead of spending most of it parched and parked in front of the television with beer and pretzels. Last year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She’s fine now, recovering well as far as we know, but sometimes I still wish I could pour warm tea all over her body. I wish tea would flood the world and cover everything that I love, everything I don’t.
I tip my head close to the mug. Steam fogs the lenses of my glasses, and I inhale, chest rising until it won’t rise any more. The warm dampness fills my lungs. Already I can taste the bitterness of soaked leaves. When it cools and is safe to swallow, the liquid slides into my throat, past a malfunctioning thyroid gland, and down into my belly where it settles like hands over an aching wound. Kit Kat saunters into the room like nothing happened.
Stapled to the end of a white string trailing from the folded bag of coagulated leaves, a paper tag is printed with the evening’s inspirational quote. Unlike Salada tea, which makes a poor attempt at humor, Yogi’s messages are profound, and I stash them in a little white drawer beneath a mirror. I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful stacked on top of Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy. I save one Salada tag. It says that Real intelligence is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. I slurp down the last bit of tea and stare out the sliding glass door.
Dad’s going in for a colonoscopy. Doctors poke at my mother’s lumpy uterus and suck her blood into plastic cylinders. My stepmother’s still waiting to find out if the radiation treatment was successful or if there’s nothing else they can do. Snow floats down, thick flakes covering the brown lumps and footprints scattered throughout the yard, and a silver spoon clinks against glass. The tea’s inside me, swimming in my veins. Kit Kat curls around my legs, lets me touch her. Scott Cairn’s book lay silent on the table. And as I reach for the teabag’s paper tab, I notice that the snow is glowing blue, blazing like a light into darkness.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Distancing Properties of Perpetual Noise
I sit curled beneath where he sits crumpled on the couch, his eyes locked into brightness coming from the sliding glass door beyond my shoulders, and my fingers tug at loose strings from his robe. My canvas bag overflows with books. The air's stuffy and full of dust and cold. It's mid-afternoon and I spent my entire day here, wishing I were someplace warm and sandy with bodies of water spanning endlessly. He wants to know if there's still a place for him in my crowded future. He wants to know why I've suddenly drifted away like soil carried from slopes of a river bank. He doesn't actually say that, but I'm trying to make poetry out of this moment, give it a piece of something that's good.
Earlier today I leaned against the sliding glass door like rain, looking over the city from his second story apartment on the hill. Sun splashed brick-red tops of buildings, budding trees, the point of a steeple rising above them all, but I watched a fat crow bob down the sidewalk with dark feathers. I wanted to see the bird spread its wings and step into the air, leave behind the hard concrete of the looming city, and take me with her. Ever since I was a little girl, I've always wanted to fly.
I wait for him to look at me, and when he does, it's as if he sees me from a great distance. He knows that I'm already gone, drifting north to my unfinished stories and final semesters, waiting patiently for the letter that will take me away, let me migrate south. You won't even let me follow you, he says, and I look down at my hands. I won't say anything to comfort him. It would be a lie.
Outside, children's voices break what he's placed between us, and I mention I heard the kids walking down his steps again last night. For months he's pulled on his boots and flung himself from the front door, leaned over the steep flight of stairs leading down to the main road, and yelled at the kids to find another away around. They never listen to him.
More than anything I need to walk. I need to leave. Essays are waiting for me. My sculptures of dreams still need to be chiseled, scraped, smoothed out and baked in an oven so I can finally paint them with colors. But he holds on to me, wonders why everything about us still feels new. It's been two years. Things should be better now. I listen for the sound of a crow, the flapping of her wings.
Later that night, after I've gone home, he calls me. I tore down those steps after you left, he says. I finally tore them fucking down. He tells me he's sorry and I say it too. We mend the broken fabric of what we have for now, but I'm still thinking of the crow leaving the city streets, the cold corner of this part of the world, and the earth that's held her for so many years.
Earlier today I leaned against the sliding glass door like rain, looking over the city from his second story apartment on the hill. Sun splashed brick-red tops of buildings, budding trees, the point of a steeple rising above them all, but I watched a fat crow bob down the sidewalk with dark feathers. I wanted to see the bird spread its wings and step into the air, leave behind the hard concrete of the looming city, and take me with her. Ever since I was a little girl, I've always wanted to fly.
I wait for him to look at me, and when he does, it's as if he sees me from a great distance. He knows that I'm already gone, drifting north to my unfinished stories and final semesters, waiting patiently for the letter that will take me away, let me migrate south. You won't even let me follow you, he says, and I look down at my hands. I won't say anything to comfort him. It would be a lie.
Outside, children's voices break what he's placed between us, and I mention I heard the kids walking down his steps again last night. For months he's pulled on his boots and flung himself from the front door, leaned over the steep flight of stairs leading down to the main road, and yelled at the kids to find another away around. They never listen to him.
More than anything I need to walk. I need to leave. Essays are waiting for me. My sculptures of dreams still need to be chiseled, scraped, smoothed out and baked in an oven so I can finally paint them with colors. But he holds on to me, wonders why everything about us still feels new. It's been two years. Things should be better now. I listen for the sound of a crow, the flapping of her wings.
Later that night, after I've gone home, he calls me. I tore down those steps after you left, he says. I finally tore them fucking down. He tells me he's sorry and I say it too. We mend the broken fabric of what we have for now, but I'm still thinking of the crow leaving the city streets, the cold corner of this part of the world, and the earth that's held her for so many years.
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